In the early days of computers, IT workers walked around thinking they were the reason the company existed, and it was a sh!ty attitude. The reality, IT is a service provider to support what a business is trying to do though technology, just as marketing is there to support the business by marketing it properly. As technology has advanced, the complexity of the infrastructure has dropped to the point where it is often compared to being an electrician. Take for example Active Directory, years ago you made a career out of being an Active Directory administrator….today it’s almost just a checklist item as organizations try to crunch budgets in their IT departments (and by the way that is wrong, AD is complex, and powerful…if you are just using AD for basic authentication you are doing it wrong). Server hardware is also been reduced, if you are hanging the next 20 years of your career on creating LUNs and configuring VSANs (the FC switch kind not the VMware kind) then you are likely in for a rude awakening as hyperconvered and pre-architected solutions take over and it becomes a matter of rolling in a rack and powering it on.

So, my question…when will that happen with software? When will the “my 5th grader can setup a VNX” change to “my 5th grader can code this app”? We are pushing software development and software interaction earlier and earlier in schools. The reality is many business people do not understand the complexity and artistry that goes into writing good code, just as they don’t understand the complexity and artistry of a good cable or server design.

Before you go throwing IT people under the bus, look ahead at your field. If you don’t think business will be looking to make producing code cheaper, I think you will be joining the SAN engineer for some extended time off in the future.

Stacki is a project I came across on Twitter that allows you to perform bare metal installations of Linux operating systems, there is a great introduction post on their project page so I am not going to rehash all of that but at a high level:

Install linux for bare metal or virtual machines

Configure RAID and network controllers

The main component of Stacki is the front end which you will install to manage your deployments that deploys “backends” which is simply the term used for the servers that Stacki builds.

At the very last VMware User Conference of 2015, Sarah Zelechoski and I presented our session - DevOps IRL (In Real Life). In our talk we discussed experiences we have had at small to medium sized organizations where DevOps methodologies were embraced.